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February 24, 2016

We are seeking papers for ‘Editing Modernism/Modernist Editing’, a one-day conference to be held at Edinburgh Napier University (Merchiston Campus) on Friday the 13th of May 2016. The conference invites scholars to share their research about and methodologies for textual editing of modernist literature. ‘Textual editing’ broadly refers to developments in the traditional research and practices involved in discovering, contextualizing, and preparing literary works for publication, for both scholarly and other readers. However, it also concerns problems and methods inherent to the production and dissemination of modernist digital editions and digital archives. We welcome proposals in any area of modernist scholarship that engages with ‘editing’, the archive, and editorial practice.

This conference will speak to the recent resurgence in interest in the modernist text as editorial object and the various platforms through which readers encounter modernist text. In modernist studies, several large-scale editorial projects are currently underway, including the Dorothy Richardson and the Wyndham Lewis Editions projects, and last year saw theComplete Prose of T.S. Eliot: Vol. II win the Modernist Studies Association book prize. These are paralleled in recent digital archives and editions such as the Modernist Versions Project and Infinite Ulysses. The question of how contemporary editorial practice can draw on modernist practice is of keen interest, as textual editing was often a key self-reflexive concern for modernist authors, many of whom were publishers and editors themselves. From the collaborative editorial practices that underpinned such works as T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood to the production of modernist little magazines, innovative modernist editorial practices continue to interest scholars as they take on the role of contemporary editors to texts such as these.

The conference will feature a selection of panel papers; a roundtable discussion joined by Dr Bryony Randall (University of Glasgow), Dr Jason Harding (Durham University), and another guest TBC; and two keynote speakers:

Professor Scott McCracken (Keele University) will present a talk about the scholarly edition as cultural production. Prof McCracken is the Principal Investigator for the Richardson Editions Project, which is funded by the AHRC and which is leading to the publication of scholarly editions of Richardson’s 13-volume Pilgrimage with Oxford University Press.

Dr Nathan Waddell (University of Nottingham) will present a talk titled ‘Problems, Possibilities, Polemics: Taking the Arrows of Wyndham Lewis’. Dr Waddell is on the Editorial Board of the Oxford University Press Complete Edition of Wyndham Lewis’s fiction and non-fiction.

For panel paper consideration, please submit a 200-word abstract and brief biography to Tara Thomson att.thomson2@napier.ac.uk by the 1st of April.
The day’s programme will be followed by a wine reception. Registration will be limited, so we ask that all participants register in advance at http://editingmodernism.eventbrite.co.uk.